Introduction

About the unit

The Oxford Heart Centre at the John Radcliffe Hospital is part of the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the largest acute teaching trusts in the UK. The centre provides regional adult cardiothoracic services to a population of 2.2 million across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, and Wiltshire.

Services provided

Adult Cardiac Surgery
Thoracic Surgery

Rehabilitation and follow up

Follow-up is usually at six weeks with the patient’s surgeon at Oxford or at the local referring hospital. The service has a full rehabilitation team that links with the network rehabilitation teams at District General Hospitals.

Access

Access by public transport is by the many buses that link the hospital to Oxford City. In addition, there is a large public car park with direct access to the south entrance.

Location:

Number and type of operations performed

This graph shows the number and percentage of each type of heart surgery done in this hospital. The number of operations is shown in the line going up the left hand side. The percentage (%) underneath each coloured bar shows how much of this hospital’s heart surgery is made up each procedure type.

The ‘key’ underneath the graph shows what procedure(s) each coloured bar shows. The abbreviations used are explained below:

Isolated: This procedure has been carried out on its own. No other procedures were done during the same operation.

CABG: Coronary artery bypass grafting

AVR: Aortic valve replacement

MV: Mitral valve procedure

You can find out more about these procedures in the ‘About cardiothoracic surgery’ section. If you or someone you know is having heart surgery, it may be helpful to know whether your hospital does lots of the procedure(s) that you need. If you have questions or concerns about the number of procedures being done at your hospital, you should speak to your heart surgeon.

In-hospital mortality rate (risk adjusted)

This graph shows the percentage of patients who die before being discharged from the hospital they had their operation at. This is called the ‘in-hospital mortality rate’.

Some hospitals do more complicated surgery on patients who are more sick, whilst others do fairly routine surgery. So that we can make fair comparisons between these hospitals, the mortality rate has been ‘risk adjusted’ to take into account the difficulty of each operation.

The green line in the middle of the graph shows the average mortality rate for heart surgery in the UK. The blue dot shows the risk adjusted mortality rate for the hospital you are looking at. The lower the blue dot appears on the graph, the lower the percentage of patients who have died after surgery.

If the blue dot is underneath the yellow dashed line near the top of the graph, then the mortality rate shown by the blue dot is within the limits we would expect.

Average patient risk profile

Some risk factors like age, gender, and other medical problems, can affect the outcome of heart surgery.

Each of the graphs below shows what percentage of this hospital's patients have each risk factor (peach bar on the left) next to the average for the whole of the UK (green bar on the right). This can tell you whether the hospital generally operates on high risk patients, and whether they specialise in doing particular types of complicated surgery, like operations on the thoracic aorta.